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Ever had a three-foot worm squirming under your skin? Or had to wheel your grossly enlarged scrotum in a wheelbarrow?

Over many years of teaching parasitology, Eugene Kaplan found a way to keep students awake: lurid stories. Now the retired biology professor and researcher from Hofstra University on Long Island, New York, has a new book, What’s Eating You?, that tucks in the science about both rare and common parasites along with the tales.

Kaplan, 78, talked to the Star about bad parsley, crotch crickets and the woman who gave birth to a bag of worms.

Your book made me retch. And itch. Why are you so keen on parasites?

The book is supposed to make you laugh as well. I love animals without backbones. I’ve spent my life studying invertebrates and these are very dramatic ones. Their extraordinary adaptation to life inside human beings makes them wonderfully fascinating.

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A lot of the parasites you describe sound like horror movie creatures. What’s the worst parasite a human can get?

(Sigh.) Well, it depends what you mean by worst. Some people pick up crab lice and it makes them very itchy. Whether you call them bloomer bunnies, crotch crickets or vulva vermin, they’re difficult to scratch and to get rid of.

Malaria is a horrible parasite because it can kill you. Most parasites have adapted to keep the host alive because when the host dies, the parasite dies.

One of the more dramatic ones is the three-foot guinea worm. You drink contaminated water that contains copepods, a common crustacean, that ate the worm larvae. The worm develops in your body, mates and crawls under your skin in your lymphatic system. When the female is full of eggs, they hatch and become a squirmy mass of larvae inside her body. She crawls toward the undersurface of the skin and emits an irritating chemical that gives you a blister.

The blister bursts upon contact with water. The female extends a loop of her body containing her uterus outside the burst blister and the uterus breaks open, releasing a white puff of microscopic larvae. Most of the female remains inside the arm. The custom is to tug on the protruding part of the worm until you have an inch or two that you can wrap around a stick and gently turn the stick. You have to pull carefully, lest the worm break and die and infect your arm, until all three feet of it are out.

That’s similar to the worm you get from a mosquito bite that causes your scrotum to be so hugely enlarged that you have to wheel it around in a wheelbarrow. That disease is called elephantiasis.

What’s the worst parasite in North America?

(Long sigh.) It’s difficult to talk about the really terrible ones because they haven’t reached us from South and Central America. They probably will, given global warming.

Global warming will bring more parasites from the tropics?

Yes. You have to realize the intermediary hosts that carry them are here now. For example, black flies can transmit a variety of bad parasites. Snails are carriers of many parasites. But the parasites aren’t here yet. Some factor in their life cycle makes them vulnerable to cold.

Bedbugs are here. I’ve heard horror stories.

I’ve seen pictures of them covering a ceiling. That was ghastly. People are horrified by them. But bedbugs are not known as primary transmitters of disease. People are also horrified by pinworms. I have a chapter on that, called “A peek into the anus of my child.”

You’ve had some personal, up-close encounters with parasites. What was the worst?

I brought a British group to the old city in Jerusalem and gave them the whole shebang, a banquet that included a dish with parsley. Evidently, the parsley had the eggs of a large worm, the Ascaris. It’s a very successful worm parasite. The parsley must have been fertilized by the human feces of a very sick farmer. I got bacterial dysentery. Six months later I “gave birth” to this worm, the size and thickness of a pencil. I saved it with great pride to show my students.

You talk about the bizarre case of the woman who thought she was pregnant, but it was tapeworms. Come on. True story?

It happened in the 1930s in the Australian Outback. The woman had an enlarged abdomen and assumed she was pregnant. When it went on for more than nine months, she went to a hospital. They didn’t know what it was. They gave her a caesarean and out came this 18-pound sphere. It was a large cyst containing thousands of tapeworms. These cysts normally live in rabbits which are eaten by foxes and other carnivores. She had somehow gotten involved in the life cycle accidentally.

Have you ever been a consultant to novelist Stephen King?

He thinks of more horrible things than exist in reality. The things I’ve talked about are relatively rare, and, as I pointed out, most parasites are trying to keep you alive. For example, bot fly larva lives under your skin in an inch-long bump. You can see it wriggling — it’s horrible but won’t cause you serious harm. Sometimes the hole left when it popped out gets infected. But that is easily curable with antibiotics.

If something popped out of my arm, I’d …

You’d flip out. It’s not pleasant.

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